There are many different types of processes for which it is advantageous to present data pertaining to the process and to the subprocesses that make up that process.
For example, in process control applications, such as power generation facilities, information about the current state of the various subprocesses is critical to enabling facility operators to identify and correct potential problems. Failure to timely identify such problems can have a catastrophic effect, and appropriate data presentation methodologies are therefore important.
Another example of a type of process for which data pertaining to the process should be presented is a business process. As used herein, the term “business process” is intended to have a broad meaning, and would include product manufacturing processes, transportation processes, client intake processes, customer file handling processes, customer service processes, and virtually any other process undertaken by a business (or government or non-profit) enterprise. Frequently, computer models of such processes are constructed so as to enable modeling and simulation of these business processes to identify bottlenecks and other possible areas for improvement. These computer models can not only present summary data about the outcome of a process, but can also show the ongoing status of a simulation. For example, the computer model may execute significantly faster than the process being modeled (e.g. one hour of simulated process time may take only one second of real-world time to execute) to enable problems to be anticipated. By using process simulation to anticipate problems, modifications to the process can be made to prevent the problem from occurring.
To use simply one example, a computer model of road and highway usage may be designed to take into account not only hour-to-hour and day-to-day changes in traffic patterns, but also trends in the number of vehicles on the road, shifts in population and employment centers, driver reactions to traffic patterns, and the like. An example of a traffic simulation project is the Intelligent Transportation Systems Centre and Testbed at the University of Toronto. By running such a simulation over a period of (simulated) years (perhaps only hours or days in real time, depending on the complexity of the model), predictions can be made about those roads and highways that are likely to be congested in future years, and highway and roadwork projects can be planned accordingly.
In a manufacturing context, a computer simulation of a manufacturing facility can be constructed and put into (simulated) operation so that potential problems may be identified, and the planned facility redesigned to obviate those problems, before the actual facility is constructed. For example, the layout of the facility might create an unexpected bottleneck. Without such simulation, the real manufacturing facility might be constructed before the problems are identified, at which point modification of the facility to address these problems is likely to be extremely costly. Using simulation allows potential problems to be identified at the design stage, when they can usually be obviated at substantially lower cost.
In order to properly analyze computer models such as those described above, data pertaining to the process (and its component subprocesses) should be presented in a manner that is useful to the end user who is analyzing the process.
As described above, both process modeling and real-world processes that require real-time data presentation are becoming more and more complex, and in many instances consist of hundreds or thousands of sub-steps/nodes. Frequently, computer display animations of the process diagram (whether for a simulated or a real-world process) are used to identify and observe within the computer display bottlenecks, heavy activity regions, or other important process characteristics. Where the process being represented in the computer display is large, there can be a multitude of potentially relevant activities happening simultaneously in various different regions of the process representation in the computer display.
The representation of a large process in a computer display can be problematic. In particular, it can be difficult for users to effectively observe and follow the representation of a large process in a computer display for areas of high interest. This is because the magnitude of the process representation prevents the entire representation from being shown on a typical computer display screen in a large enough size sufficient to enable perception of meaningful data.
More particularly, where a “zoom” capability is used to minimize in the computer display the viewing size of the process artifacts so as to increase the information in the viewing area of the computer display, such scaling efforts greatly reduce the usability of the process representation since the objects become too small to be read within the computer display. One approach that has been used is to permit users to manually scroll vertically and horizontally within the process representation by means of scroll bars within a window, so that they can focus on a particular portion of the process representation. This approach is often cumbersome and inefficient, and creates the risk that a user may fail to observe important data in a portion of the process representation that is not within the current viewing window.